by Eben Venter
The people in the study are sitting in stony silence, with just the crystal shards of the glass, scattered on the rectangle of tiles, glittering as the light catches them, and both Sissy and Marko, who must in the meantime have helped themselves to a drink, take a sip as he enters.
‘Well, yes,’ says Uncle Hannes to no one in particular, ‘old Bennie was a real old bastard, there’s no getting away from that.’
‘What else?’ Mattheüs takes a long drag at his cigarette, ‘What about the rest of his money, his shares?’
‘Mattheüs, please, I think we must first try to get some perspective on the matter,’ says the attorney. (How he despises the old-fashioned prick of a man.) ‘Sit down first so that we can carry on reading your father’s will like civilised people. Can someone pour the man another drink?’ (He hates, hates his condescension, how could Pa ever have chosen such a piece of shit for his will.)
He requests that the will be read from the beginning, please, he’ll sit quietly to the end, keep his trap shut, and now, as he hears it for a second time from that prim and proper mouth of the attorney with his sibilants and his tidy consonants – he’s willing to bet that mouth has never serviced his wife – he knows that’s it, that’s how his father wanted it, ‘codicil’ and ‘legal consequences’ and ‘Master of the Supreme Court’. He hears all the terms without considering or wanting to consider their context; he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Maybe get up and go and look at himself in the mirror above the fireplace to see what his face is showing.
When there’s a pause, he has no idea where in the will or why, Sissy comes and crouches next to him and takes his hand and drags the empty chair closer and sits down next to him, takes his half-smoked cigarette and has a pull, first time in years, and says very softly, as gently as she can: ‘He knew about you and Jack here in the house, Matt.’
‘How?’ he asks. The attorney keeps gazing expressionlessly at the document, page four or five or whatever, and Marko looks straight ahead at his ironed jeans, both of them to sort of pretend that they can’t hear what he and Sissy are saying. Only Uncle Hannes, the good old honest type, looks at the two of them, at what they’re saying and what’s happening.
‘Pa told me on the telephone.’
‘That he was going to change the will?’
‘No, he never said that. You know yourself how he was, Matt. You know how he kept things to himself.’
‘Don’t come and tell me how Pa was. I knew him a thousand times better than you did.’
‘Matt, it’s a shock to me too. It’s the last thing I want for you. Ag, for heaven’s sake,’ she looks at Marko, ‘you can have my share, or a part of it, I don’t really care. It’s only money, after all.’
And Marko mumbles something about the drought, that she should think about them too, the conditions at Luiperdskop, and he thinks he’s going to lose it right there, hearing such undiluted shit as if he’s not even in the room. He looks up at the Blood River picture that always upset him as a child, the dark-green shadows, the jack-in-the-box Zulus and the terrified Boers with those hysterical plumes of smoke from their guns, the fact that that – that – should be named as the founding moment of a nation or a people, it’s ridiculous, it’s the first thing he’d wanted to take down and chuck out. But now, this house, everything, he wants nothing, just the things in his bedroom, nothing else, Sissy can have it all and stuff it into her already over-full house, he’s decided already, none of this dreck to stir up all kinds of memories in him, he’s done with everything in here.
The attorney’s voice, crawling on, an oiled insect-thing penetrating deep inside every one of your orifices. ‘Mattheüs, if I may say something about your father and me, about some of our conversations. I want you to know that your father himself wrestled with this, it was never a cut-and-dried affair. I guided him in all this to the best of my abilities. In the long run, your father, independently, and I want to stress this most strongly in the light of the emotional issue that it is, in the long run, your father decided on his own, after he’d made some careful calculations, that the financial support or monetary gift, depending on how one looks at it, that he provided you with for your four-year overseas trip, plus the funding of your present business plus the Mercedes, brings your inheritance in line with that of your sister; in fact, it is slightly larger.’
At this point, Mattheüs gets up and gestures to the man to be quiet, he is cold, that’s how calm he is, and when he starts speaking, he is just as cool, and with that indomitable authority he’s inherited from his father. (He couldn’t stand it when his father carried on in that loaded tone of voice.) He walks to the liquor cabinet and refills his glass and speaks while walking, his back to the four people seated there. ‘I don’t need your explanation or anybody else’s. I knew my father better than you ever could. I’m asking once again: What about all his shares? What happened to them?’
‘There are investments that will mature in a few years’ time. They are bequeathed to you and your sister, as stipulated further on in his will. I haven’t come to that yet. Mattheüs, if I may add: You must, you have to also realise that your father lived well; he was not a man who stinted on things. That Mercedes E-class in the garage is less than a year old. He never drove the same model for long. Just think: he’s been retired for more than twenty years. That’s the first thing. And the second thing is that Motor & Allied Workers’ Insurance didn’t cover all his medical expenses. Your father was treated for three years with the very latest medicines, MabThera if I’m not mistaken, some of them not even approved by the Medical Council, but it was nevertheless his wish that they be used. But now you must all remember, these medicines were unfortunately not yet covered by his medical insurance. I’m talking about something in the region of R900 000 here. Then there are my own charges – your father unfortunately had his will repeatedly redrafted. There were administrative costs involved, I don’t know how else to put it.’
Mattheüs doesn’t sit down again. He buzzes around the study like a bee or something; he loathes the man so much that, unusually for him, he thinks it might be a sin. He walks past his father’s modest collection of books, Pa always wanted to add to it, always said, man, if I have time, I want to buy a whole lot of books, you can help me with that, Mattie. His father was never a great reader. His father. What now? Whither, now, him and his father?
And whither him and Jack once the house has been sold? A flat. Where? In Sea Point?
He can’t get past it: that the will is a refutation of everything he’d believed existed between him and his father. He’ll be grappling with this for the rest of his life. He doesn’t have it in him to get over the severed connections, printed here in black and white.
‘Let me give you a refill, Matt,’ and Uncle Hannes takes his glass and goes to pour him a drink. ‘You know,’ he says when he’s right next to him, ‘I gave my love away too cheaply to my Paul. That’s what I’m thinking of right now. It’s the same thing that happened between you and your father.’
‘You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about, Uncle Hannes.’
Sissy unhooks the copper dustpan and brush from the stand on the mantelpiece and starts sweeping up the shards without missing a single one. He looks at her hunched back that suddenly no longer reflects the youthfulness of her face and goes outside to Jack and the children.
‘Just a quick call to hear how things are. Can’t talk for long. I think of you so much, Boetie.’
‘Since when have you been Boetie-ing me?’
‘Ag, Matt, don’t be like that. We have to pull together now. There’s just the two of us left. Don’t give up now, please, Matt. Have you and Jack found a flat yet?’
‘Not yet. Don’t know if we will.’
‘But where are you going to live, Matt? The auction’s in a week.’
‘Nearly all the stuff is in storage now. The house is empty.
All the walls have been stripped. Not a single portrait or painting left. It’s horrible. I just about die when I have to get up at night and go to the kitchen. That echo of nothing, no carpets, no furniture.’
‘It’s better like that, then you can start taking leave of the place. Mattie. Think about it. It’s reality, please, I don’t want you to be hurt any more. The sooner the better.’
‘The sooner the better what?’
‘Ag, please, Matt. You must get out of there. Number nine Poinsettia Road’s time has passed.’
‘That’s easy for you to say. This house is part of me in a way it was never part of you. Listen, Sissy, I broke open that old kist with ma’s stuff inside. You remember, we could never find the key. There are some of her old dresses in there, everything still as she folded it in tissue paper with moth balls and all, just like that. There’s that sea-green dress of hers, do you remember it?’
‘With the beads down the front, Pa said it made her look like an ice maiden.’
‘The beads are in a V, almost like the snail trail of hairs on a man’s stomach.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Are you coming to the auction?’
‘Too tied up here with the children and everything. It’s terribly dry here, you’ve got no idea. We have to feed all the sheep. I might still have come for your sake, but I don’t actually feel up to it. I’d rather not know what happens to that house. It’s over and out for me, Boetie.’
‘Sissy?’
‘What?’
‘No, never mind.’
‘Say it!’
‘You know, it’s not really the house I’m making such a fuss about. That’s not what’s making me feel so raw.’
‘I know, Boetie. I know.’
‘Can’t sleep through any more. It’s like a knife that’s been pushed into me and someone twists and twists the blade till I want to go mad.’
‘What about therapy, won’t that be a solution? So you can get it all out of your system.’
‘Do you think I’ve got money for that now? If anything goes wrong with my takeaway, I’m buggered.’
‘Don’t give up, Matt.’
‘Okay, okay.’
‘I must get going, fetch children and so on. Bye, Matt. Love you lots.’
‘What must I do with ma’s kist stuff? Those dresses are precious.’
‘I don’t know. Can’t think now.’
Cunt.
It’s three days or so before the auction. Mattheüs just knows that a house with a garden like this, a real gem, it’ll sell like hot cakes, he’s working like a man possessed to get Duiker’s Takeaway going again: he doesn’t want to miss the bus. When he says this to Emile, he nods and carries on chopping the pile of garlic on his board, understands absolutely nothing.
He pitches up every morning all shiny and scrubbed, extravagantly sprayed with Clicks deodorant, and always with a subservience you seldom come across in Cape Town, and smeared on top of all this, like rancid butter, is that wicked little smile of his. He no longer sees his wife and children and the dirty great dog, nor his comrades that he used to drag along with him in the morning as if they were a kind of gang or something, right up to the gate of Duiker’s Takeaway. Mattheüs now realises that it’s a form of security that he, a stranger in Cape Town, wanted to surround himself with. And there’s his efficiency and dedication and the knowledge that Mattheüs won’t just fire him, something he doesn’t actually say, but Mattheüs knows it’s what he’s thinking in his struggle for survival, his own and that of his family; and by lunchtime, with the main rush of customers, he breaks out in a sweat, ‘That deodorant you use is shit,’ and to compensate for his wayward body, he tries to serve even more efficiently, to count change, to carry out instructions, it becomes impossible to think of Duiker’s without the Congolese.
And Matthew must please not forget to drive him to the airport in his car tomorrow evening, please Matthew, that’s when his son arrives from Kenya, it’s a big day for him, he smiles sweetly to involve Mattheüs in whatever way he can, in the good and the bad of his life (right now, only good); and Mattheüs, who keeps shying away, looking away from this man, away, and self-tormentingly, almost like the adolescent satisfaction he repeatedly experiences after the umpteenth porn fix, struggles with what he’s started calling the ‘severed connection’. His father, who was simply not in a position to make the connection between his care for him, his openly expressed love, you could even call it blatant love, and then drawing a line from that indisputable point to making proper provision for him, Mattheüs Duiker, in his will.
The recurrent disappointment with the man overwhelms him, so that at times he’s left standing there with one of the big saucepans as if his hands have been tied to its handles with a set of clever knots, and Emile notices immediately that there’s something wrong, makes clicking sounds with his tongue, even touches Mattheüs’s arm fleetingly, and would go so far as to hug him if he were given any encouragement by Mattheüs.
It eats at him: the total breakdown of the man he’d believed in, wanted to believe, the man he’d give another chance to, if only he could. So, that was Benjamin Duiker’s defect, he couldn’t possibly have been entirely without fault: his religious orthodoxy (thou shalt not crawl into bed with another man, not in his house) prevailed. His religion came between him and the affection (pure, anybody could see that) for his son. Fuck the house and the garden with the frangipani and the lemon tree and the entire contents of the house, the long family history, thick and thin, the love and hate that was grafted onto that house, fuck it all. But as the Lord is his witness, the fact that his father saw fit to sever that connection between him and his own son, that sticks in his gullet. The unforgivable, short-sighted – especially that – failing. And more: an arrogance as hard and cold as an old, old mountain; orthodoxy elevated over love. That’s what it amounts to, and Mattheüs – ‘Take this saucepan from me, please Emile,’ can’t, simply cannot, doesn’t want to, and how, how should he – slides down onto his haunches against the wall warmed by the stove and hides his face with his food-hands until he feels the coolness of a glass of water pressing against the back of his hands.
It’s up to Emile to put everything away, clear up, wipe and mop up, and then to count the cash without any mistakes, record the amount, put the money into five bank bags and then inside Mattheüs’s leather bag before giving it to him, to switch off the neon lights and lock the steel door, rattling it to make sure it’s properly closed as he’s seen Mattheüs do, and finally to hand him the key.
‘My son, tomorrow evening, please Matthew, arriving at seven o’clock at Cape Town Airport. Please, man. Can I ask you this one thing for me, please Matthew?’
Mattheüs stares at him, and Emile would have to be an imbecile not to notice this: the apathy, the unwillingness to get involved with him and his soon-to-arrive son.
At home, he realises that he’s left the Beretta in the lentil drum again (Uncle Hannes wanted to know whether he still needed the thing, shouldn’t he rather take it back to the farm) and, car keys in hand, he hurries down the echoing passage without a single carpet, portrait, or painting. Outside on the stoep, he decides against it. Nobody can get in there. Tomorrow when he gets in and before Emile arrives, he’ll check quickly. On automatic pilot, he lights a cigarette and sniffs the herbiness of the evening air. It’s nearly autumn.
Jack’s friend Charnie goes to Johannesburg for a week’s work and offers them her flat, a one-bedroom on a freeway in Pinelands. It’s the last evening before the auction, and the last evening before Mattheüs finally has to surrender the spare keys to the estate agent, and he makes himself sick, he’s so restless.
‘So, go,’ Jack says to him, at his wits’ end and fed-up that Mattheüs isn’t mature enough to accept his fate with the family home. He knows Mattheüs wants to go back to the empty house. T
o torment himself. ‘Go, Matt. But then let that be your final farewell. What’s the matter with you? It’s just a house, after all. Bricks and a roof. I’m just as disappointed. More than you think. Make no mistake. Do you know how I fantasised about you and me in that house? Then it turned out differently. Tough. It’s between you and your father, man. And even if the house had become yours, I can’t help wondering. I think it would still have haunted you and Uncle Bennie. Go, and try to get over the thing.’
Mattheüs doesn’t answer Jack. Ever since the reading of the will, at the moment when the attorney said ‘number nine Poinsettia Road’, when the tip of his raptor’s beak bent down and almost touched the exaggeratedly pursed lips on the ‘poin’ of Poinsettia, and the following flat announcement of the Silver Cloud Christian Fellowship as one of the three beneficiaries, Mattheüs has deliberately turned inward.
Reaching their house, now just the ghost of a house, he walks without even thinking about it into the study and inflates the mattress he’s brought along, and places it on the exact spot where his father’s desk once stood, not where it had been moved by him and Samantha to clear space for the sickbed, but in its original place to the right of the fireplace, the place his father had carefully chosen for light and proportion in relation to the furniture in the rest of the room.
He rolls his sleeping bag out on top of the mattress and takes a sip from the bottle of brandy he’s brought along for the night – he won’t be eating, he’s got no appetite anyway – and with his knees pulled up he sits on the mattress without thinking of anything or even trying to recall anything from the past, any incident or conversation entwined with this room or this house. He takes another sip and enjoys the burning sensation down his throat and into his empty stomach. He’s surprised at how calm he’s become all of a sudden. And then remembers that that was often, though also not as a rule, the effect that his father’s study had on him. After a while, sitting still in the darkening room – the electricity has long since been cancelled – he hears a chittering sound from the far left-hand corner where his father used to keep his steel filing cabinet. He peers in that direction and thinks he can make out the shape of a crumpled-up cloth or something similar – Samantha may have left it there with the final cleaning-up – and gets a fright when there’s a slight movement. Or is he imagining things? He switches on the torch of his iPhone and accidentally activates the strobe function, then gets up and follows the sharp white flashing light that lends an unreal atmosphere to his father’s study, and as he approaches, step by step, the crumpled thing in the corner, and the strobe light alternately lights everything up and wipes it out, faces come to him, shapes of himself as a child in his pyjamas. Briefly he sees himself entering his father’s sanctum, maybe to come and say good night, and the image disappears just to let Sissy in for a flashing second, softly crying and rigid as if sleepwalking and noticeably calmer than he, and finally the figure of his mother who looks as if she’s floating and not really touching the earth, which pleases him, she never liked the place, too overwhelmingly Bennie, too much of his sweat and breath; still, he’s the one that Mattheüs searches for in the flashing strobe, to loom also as an apparition, but nothing comes. His father is gone. Stone dead.